


Misty Blue

by CrossedBeams



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, F/M, Mild Smut, post iwtb
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-12
Updated: 2016-09-12
Packaged: 2018-08-14 16:17:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8020654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CrossedBeams/pseuds/CrossedBeams
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if Mulder and Scully had gone to London instead of a tropical island after IWTB? Written for txf-fic-chicks birthday prompt and this explores how our beloved agents might have tried to fight back the darkness together...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Misty Blue

##  **_BELGRAVIA, LONDON - OCTOBER 2008_ **

Mulder had forgotten the smell of London in autumn; a conscious forgetting, burying it deep at the back of his mind alongside other, less palatable souvenirs of his relationship with Phoebe Green. If he had the energy he could probably spend several days really hating that woman for tainting his memories of his years in England.

But he’s older now and tries to save what energy he can muster for warmer, sweeter things. Things like Scully, barefoot on the hotel floorboards in his wine-red, aran sweater and nothing underneath, interrogating the poor concierge over some problem with their mysterious plans for the day. He would be happy to stay here and breathe the woodsy-wet air and light a fire and just be but he won’t say so, not when Scully has made all of this happen. This is their first holiday since he’s has a passport with his real name on it, a reclamation of their freedom, all pinned on the previously-lapsed feast day of October 13th. Today. His birthday.

Forty-seven seems like a funny sort of age to rediscover the art of celebrating birthdays but Scully had been adamant and he would do anything for her just now. Always really, but especially now. The Monica Bannan case had almost broken them; he felt her grip on him slacken, saw the flash of an escape sign in her eyes, felt the sickening fear of impending loss settle heavy in his stomach but she had stayed… somehow she still loves him enough to stay. He reminds himself of the time on the run when she tipsy-whispered to him that their love was a universal invariant but he doesn’t believe it anymore. How could Scully love what he has become the same way she loved who he used to be? Maybe she hasn’t noticed yet that the moon is masquerading as the sun, that light is dimmer and days are colder, maybe he can keep up the charade long enough to put things right. And until then, if Scully wants to shake off the dust of their fugitive days with things that mundane people do, like date nights, Sundays at the farmers’ market and now, birthdays, then Mulder will smile and be the best birthday boy imaginable.

In moments like these, he’s hardly pretending. Away from the unremarkable house things seem simpler. Lighter. There is no hospital pager, no study full of mouldering files, no family album given in joyous times and now, still half-empty, staring accusingly cross from a dusty shelf. This is London and there is dark beer and darker panelling, crisp golden leaves, winding streets and a small redhead who looks at everything as if it’s magical just by virtue of being in England. He found a stack full of travel guides, maps and recommendations stuffed in a bureau drawer a month ago, dotted with Scully’s handwriting as she tried to prepare, to learn the city from words and charts, to export the prepared, efficient woman she was at home. Then he had watched it all fall away the instant they got out of the black cab on to the leaf strewn street.

There aren’t words for the misty damp of a London morning in October, for the peculiar glow of shining, uneven pavements or for how the low-hanging sun burnishes the leaves to brazen gold against the grey sky. You can’t prepare for a city so steeped in its ways that it’s forgotten how idiosyncratic it is. For the first time in forever, Mulder regrets not having a camera ready to capture Scully turning slowly in the sepia sunlight, admiring the red-brick terrace of the hotel, the higgledy run of buildings older than their home country, her smiling and blushing when she catches him staring.

Instead, he takes her hand pulling her into the past, into a maze of winding corridors and brass doorknobs, a past without alien conspiracy or men lurking in the shadows and with every twist of the panelled hall he feels her joy push back against the hollowness Mulder had thought might swallow him from within.

He was surprised to learn that Scully had never seen London, to hear the yearning in her voice for the streets of Dickens and Shakespeare and all those other dusty old men she could quote and disagree with in the same sentence. He’d thought perhaps she’d pick an island for their escape, some sun drenched place where the heat would burn off the dark stain of Father Joe and his visions, the questions asked that neither of them wanted to answer. London had never crossed his mind until she said it, and though he had been poised to refuse, to tell her about the birthday weekend with Phoebe that ended with him wandering alone in a park with a broken spirit, when he saw the flash of excitement in Scully’s eyes, heard the reverence in her voice for this mysterious city, he had agreed in a second.

And as his small tourist gives up on the phone and pads softly back to bed, red stitches vivid on the cream of her thighs, he is glad he did.

Scully pouts, lips rosy from earlier kisses,

‘They messed up my plan,’ she complains, ‘We were supposed to go for birthday cake at Fortnum & Mason this afternoon but they got the date wrong and were expecting us yesterday. So now I don’t have birthday cake for you.’.

Mulder reaches for the front of the sweater and pulls her towards him, wanting her near, to feel her heat instead of the cool of the sheets. She settles in the curve of his body and presses her cheek to his arm, face bare of makeup and genuinely downcast, as if the lack of a cake matters to him. He loses his fingers in the richness of her hair, longer now than he’s ever seen it before.

‘It’s okay,’ he murmurs, meaning it. ‘I didn’t really feel like getting dressed today anyway.’ And though she smiles into his skin, acknowledging both his acceptance and his innuendo they settle where they are, neither of them ready to turn the intimate moment into the kind of tryst that a comment like that would have inspired in their early years as lovers. It’s not that he doesn’t want her, he does, the morning-tumbled sheets are evidence of that, but in this moment, in the first unexpected silence of their trip, he needs to just feel her, be with her as someone with nothing to offer but a warm arm and slow even breaths.

Every heartbeat that Scully stays, every second that she chooses this silent, wretched man, without needing him for a guide or a sounding board or a lover, he claws back a centimetre from the hollowness. He’s stored up enough of these moments in London to completely rewrite the city, to expunge all the harshness of Phoebe and paint over the stain with Scully in his red sweater, in a grey coat in the park, huddled laughing under a green umbrella while he tries to hail a black cab on the wrong side of the road. Now he’s saving against the flight home, against the day she goes back to work, back to saving lives while he returns to living a half-life of passed pasts and improbable futures. He wonders what the half-life of a Mulder is, how quickly they decay, destabilise and start to poison those around them? How much longer he can fight the corrosiveness of both nature and nurture? Scully stirs and he clutches her back to him like a lifeline, clinging to her goodness.

‘Not yet,’ and something broken in his voice stops her from asking why. Instead she pulls him closer, sliding up until her head nestles under his chin, lashes smoothing the lump in his throat and lips dropping comfort-kisses along his collarbone. He wraps his arms around her tighter than normal, willing the warmth and light of her to somehow sink through the cage of his ribs and start a fire that will burn away all of the darkness. She hums, something familiar, some short tune from their past, and his heart hurts for nights in the forest and days driving cross country and the younger man who had been able to give Scully everything, who deserved the gift that was her love. The man whose birthday Scully wants to celebrate….Mulder thinks maybe it’s time to tell her that he’s not sure that man is still alive, that he wants so badly to find him again but he’s so very lost, so very far away.

He’s opening his mouth when a knock at the door startles the confession from his lips and the secrets he’s been trying so hard to choke out fall back into the desolate silence within. Scully unfurls from her spot, glancing back with a strange look in her eyes. At the door she holds a hushed conversation with whoever ignored the do not disturb sign that has hung in place for most of the week. She looks back at him once, then again and he feels in her gaze the question she will ask when she returns. The fact that he never uttered a syllable won’t matter; she felt the words in his body, in the breath he took to carry the sounds to her. And so he rolls out of bed, dragging a scratchy wool blanket round his waist to cross to the window and open it wider, putting the strong wall of his back between her and him and willing the tears and the sadness back into a prettily wrapped birthday box. He flicks on the radio and against every rule of coincidence it’s that same song Scully was humming, if more tunefully delivered - the bluesy swing of Dorothy Moore and Misty Blue.

In the crisp breeze off the street Mulder lets the music sink into him, giving shape to his melancholy and the energy to hide it a little longer. He hears the door shut and silently counts Scully’s short steps across the floor. Instead of letting her reach him he turns at the last second, pulls her close and spins them into a shambling waltz, him naked except for a blanket and her tiny and teetering, sweater swinging and what looks like a cake box in one hand.

As they settle into the melody, he throws the box onto the bed and drags Scully’s arms around his neck, pulling her almost off her feet and lacing her in his arms, making her his whole world the way he didn’t at the Cher concert. How much time they wasted… Against his chest Scully is mouthing the words, a murmuring, melancholic echo of the the song’s heartache, of their story; the sweet devastation of handing someone your battered heart forever, imagining bright futures and good intentions and then watching as it time makes it heavy, wondering if your gift has become a burden.

Were Mulder willing to break the spell of the music, to look at Scully with eyes that would reveal everything he has been hiding, then he would ask her why she was humming this song. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t want to hear that he is her tragic flaw, the misty blue shadow of a man she will always love but shouldn’t. Instead he just places his feet carefully, weaving small paths around the room, spinning them further into their own gravity until they find the bed.

The song fades and the cake box slides with his blanket to the ground, the red sweater falling softly after them as Al Green takes over on vocals. Wistful, bluesy colours are chasing them through the day, art reflecting life as songs of bruised hearts hide sorrow behind lyrical, sensual beats. This beautiful broken day couldn’t have come together more fittingly if Scully had planned it.

He kisses her like she’s air, gasping desperately for something only Scully can give and she clings to his shoulders and gives it to him. Her nails are anchors, heavy and sharp in his shoulders, as if by holding on until he bleeds, until he meets her eyes to beg mercy, she can drag him home. And that then, everything will be okay.

Mulder almost believes her, in moments like these all things seem possible. He wants to taste her, to celebrate another year with the sweetness of Scully, to lock himself in the safe space between her thighs for a dying man’s last meal. But she won’t let go, won’t let him look away as she slips over him, one hand holding his chin, making him watch as she sinks down, promising him with her body that she is right here, as close to him as anyone can be, as close as he will let her. Her eyes are stormy and desperate, fiercely proud, then tender. Then demanding. The breeze from the window chills her skin to braille, but the shivering starts somewhere deeper, somewhere primal. It gathers, Scully trying to hold the binding, questioning look until he loses control and gives himself away but the rhythm overpowers them and her eyes flicker shut, head tipping back on a tide of pleasure. Contact is lost, the truth unspoken and losing her, even as she loses herself around him, breaks something in Mulder and tears start to flow, betraying his despair.

Suddenly desperate for more contact, anything to staunch the tears Mulder flips them, pinning Scully between his body and the bed, sliding deeper, covering every inch of her with him, arms, thighs, pulses… He wonders if perhaps he mirrors her perfectly he can fool the universe into letting him walk in her footsteps, to follow her into the light.

And then there is light everywhere, behind his eyes, streaming across them from the window. Light is the sound Scully makes when he adds his fingers to her pleasure, tweaking and tickling her into liquidity, leaving her boneless, moulded seamlessly to his chest as he pounds once, twice at the gates of heaven and finally finds the freedom he has been hoping for. Those few seconds where there is no world, no room, no music. Just him, illuminated with Scully where the blackness cannot touch them. Maybe this is the one place he can mend whatever is broken, but it dwindles, fades and is lost.

In the quiet afterglow he hopes that she mistakes his tear-tracks for sweat, his exhaustion for exertion and he hides his recovery behind the very expensive cake box he rescues from the floor, an edible apology from Fortnum & Mason.

Turning with a convincing smile to Scully he jokes,

‘Looks like I get to have my cake and eat it!’

Her laughter is the real, head-back ringing kind and he adds the sound to his new version of London, another souvenir he will treasure and, claiming back one more breath from the darkness, he cuts the cake.

**Author's Note:**

> This started out witht he intention of being fluff but went somewhere else entirely! I'm still fascinated by the gap between IWTB's hopeful end and Scully leaving and this is me exploring my headcanon - I never could imagine them in Fiji! Thank you to stellagibsonisalifeforce for the speedy beta and txf-fic-chicks for the prompt!


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